[box]OPERA
“The Love of the Nightingale” Opera Australia, Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House
until November 1. [/box]

IN his latest opera, “The Love of the Nightingale”, Australian composer Richard Mills takes on the classic Greek myth of the Nightingale and the Swallow and turned it into a contemporary opera.

Exploited in poetry and drama by Ovid, Shakespeare, the Romanic poets and TS Eliot, it is no longer a well-known tale, so requires elaborate telling for a 2011 audience.

Overcome by lust induced by the vengeful but lovely goddess Aphrodite, the Thracian king Tereus, military saviour of Athens, rapes his young sister-in-law Philomel as he brings her to meet her sister Procne.

He silences her by pulling out her tongue. In a final apotheosis all three are turned into birds.

Mills’ opera will inevitably be compared to his earlier work “Batavia”, drawn from the early history of Australia.

Equally a tale of unbridled lust and power-play, “Batavia” is a simpler story, told directly both in the libretto by Peter Goldsworthy and in Mills’ music.

Not so with “Nightingale”. A cumbersome text by British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker sees the already complicated plot embellished with a play within a play (a chunk lifted verbatim from Euripides’ “Hippolytus”) and the subplot of a handsome sea-captain for Philomel to fall in love with.

Director Tama Matheson stages a lively Bacchanal to substitute for the really nasty bit in the myth, where the two girls serve up the king’s son to him for dinner, and a “postlude” of exceptional banality where the characters reflect on the evils of life and the way in which they will transcend them.

The opening scenes where a lighthearted sense of banter between the innocent sisters fall flat.

Superb choral work, especially from the king’s attendants, partly compensates for some dull duets, though the taunting music of Philomel immediately preceding the rape scene is powerful.

Given that one of Wertenbaker’s persistent motifs is the human incapacity with words, it is notable that two of the most touching moments musically rise above the verbal.

These occur in the play scene, where Taryn Fiebig as a scantily clad (in one scene nearly unclad) goddess Aphrodite displays her power in beautifully-phrased vocalising.

The second occurs right at the end where Emma Matthews as Philomel, released from the bondage of life, bursts into ravishing nightingale-like trilling for several minutes.

The three central characters are all powerfully rendered. Matthews as Philomel and former Canberra singer Richard Anderson dominate in the first half, but Anke Hoppner as the sister Procne holds the stage and the musical interest as the human plot grinds towards its grisly end.

The action is played out on a multipurpose set by Dan Potra, who also designed the set for Batavia. The many scenes are hand-moved effectively by cast members.

“The Love of the Nightingale” is too diverse in musical and thematic focus,  disobeying most of the classical unities recommended by Aristotle.

Though superbly performed, it is hampered by a dull libretto; it is unlikely to become one of the high points in Opera Australia’s contemporary repertoire.